The Languages of Native North America

Massachusett was spoken in southeastern Massachusetts around present Boston,
Cape Cod, the Elizabeth Islands, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. Dialects were
said to have varied enough to make communication difficult. Literacy was introduced
early by missionaries, particularly John Eliot at Natick, who translated the Bible
(1663) and produced a grammar (1666), primer (1669), and other documents. A
partial dictionary from Eliot's Bible translation appears in Trumbull 1903. The speech
of the mainland is also represented in a vocabulary from 1707-8 by Cotton (1829).
A wordlist from the North Shore is in Wood 1634. A translation of the Psalms and
the Gospel of John into the speech of Martha's Vineyard (Wampanoag =
Pokanoket) is in Mayhew 1709. Cowesit, spoken in northern Rhode Island, is
documented in Williams 1643. The language was last used at the end of the 19th
century, although Speck extracted 29 words *with great difficulty' in 1907 (Prince
1907). Goddard & Bragdon 1988 contains a valuable collection of all known
manuscript writings in the language by native speakers (deeds, wills, town records,
etc.) with facsimile reproductions, decipherment, and translation. Included is a
historical survey, grammatical sketch, and Massachusett and English indices of words.

Qosely related to Massachusett is Narragansett, spoken in present Rhode Island
and known principally from Williams 1643. It was last used early in the 19th century,
but Gatschet recorded about 20 words in 1879 Providence (1973). A wordlist
recorded in Newport by Ezra Stiles in 1769 from *a Narragansett Indian', published
in Cowan 1973a, may actually represent an Eastern Niantic component of Mohegan-
Pequot (Goddard 1978: 72). Work with the Williams materials includes discussions
of phonology (Aubin 1972, Pentland 1979) and morphology (Hagenau 1962).

Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The I^anguages of Native North
America. (Cambridge: Cambridge Utiiversit}^ Press.